UC Berkeley Professor and TerraSwarm PI receives IEEE Fellow distinction

On November 28th, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) named Terraswarm PI and UC Berkeley professor Sanjit Seshia as a newly elevated Fellow, a prestigious honor within the technical community. Professor Seshia was selected for contributions to formal methods for inductive synthesis and algorithmic verification.

The IEEE Fellow distinction is reserved for select members who have a remarkable record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. More about this notable distinction in INDIAWEST.

TerraSwarm PI and Professor at the University of Washington speaks for Apple at NIPS conference

While simultaneously an Associate Professor of Machine Learning at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Washington and a TerraSwarm PI, Carlos Guestrin addressed attendees at the 2017 NIPS conference as Apple's Director of Machine Learning. Prof. Guestrin spoke about the powerful computer systems and large datasets available to machine-learning engineers who join Apple. Winning applause from his audience, he also announced that Apple is open sourcing software to help application developers use machine learning first developed in his own startup Turu, which was acquired by Apple last summer.

To see more, go to Patently Apple as well as an article about Apple's revelation of more of its self-driving technology at the same conference that appears in Wired.

Can driverless cars be safe? Penn State Professor and TerraSwarm PI Rahul Mangharam and team are working on it

Much attention in the area of autonomous cars is focused in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Carnegie Mellon University has positioned itself as a leader in this field. The University of Pennsylvania, along with CMU, is a key player in Mobility21, a five-year, federally funded $14 million program to investigate transportation technology, including autonomous vehicles. Colleagues at at CMU are experimenting with their own autonomous car while scientists at Penn work in a lab driving cars virtually in all types of weather and lighting to test how well the software adapts to the changes it would face in the real world.

Rahul Mangharam, associate professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading a team of six researchers in pursuit of what they describe as a "driver's license test" for self-driving cars. The test involves a rigorous use of mathematical diagnostics and simulated reality to determine the safety of autonomous vehicles before they ever hit the road.

All in service of rating robot drivers, white boards covered in complex equations, shelves full of makeshift toy cars and computer screens displaying video games comprise the environment of the Penn lab. Penn scientists run the autonomous driving software, called Computer Aided Design for Safe Autonomous Vehicles, through both mathematical diagnostics and the virtual reality test drives on Grand Theft Auto to see when the system fails.

“You can never have 100 percent safety,” Mangharam said. “You can design a system that would not be at fault intentionally.” As much as he believes in autonomous technology, Mangharam is concerned about our society's tendency to neglect regulatory oversight as we embrace a new toy.

See article at The Inquirer